Think of a long expanse of grass and trees, populated by plants and animals of all kinds. Whether you’re picturing a forest near your home, an African landscape, a seashore or simply the ocean floor, you’re thinking of an ecosystem right now.Globally, an ecosystem is a place (a biotope) where plants and animal species (a biocenosis) develop and interact. On an academic level, we often quote Tansley, who very aptly defined what an ecosystem is in the biological sciences:”the whole system (in the sense of physics) including not only the organism-complex, but also the whole complex of physical factors forming what we call the environment of the biome” (Tansley, 1935, p.299).What I particularly like in this definition is the notion of complexity. Because yes, ecosystems are complex. I’m not saying complicated, I’m saying complex. These systems are said to be complex because they exhibit characteristics that are unique to them, such as nonlinearity, emergence, spontaneous order, adaptation, and feedback loops, among others (Ladyman & Wiesner, 2020)
But instead of studying biological ecosystems, I’m concentrating on socio-economic ecosystems. In theory, these systems should behave in the same way as biological systems, and a whole body of management literature is developing on this basis. I find it fascinating to see companies, people and their interactions from a biological point of view, and to test theories borrowed from biology. How does an innovation or business ecosystem emerge? Does its emergence follow the same dynamics as a marine or forest ecosystem? Who are the players involved in development? What are the flows? This is an essential question, because unlike a biological ecosystem, where the flows are energy exchanges (from the sun, then from biomass), this energy doesn’t exist in an economic ecosystem.
These are the questions that motivate me and led me to write my doctoral thesis, with one question in mind: How do these social-economic ecosystems react to disturbances?
Références:
Ladyman, James & Lambert, James & Wiesner, Karoline. (2013). What is a complex system?. European Journal for Philosophy of Science. 3. 10.1007/s13194-012-0056-8.
Tansley, A. G. (1935). The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms. Ecology, 16(3), 284–307. https://doi.org/10.2307/1930070
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